Race issues 'best served' by Department of Citizenship

The Home Office should be stripped of its responsibility for race, a Labour MP proposed yesterday as he called for a Government drive to create "world-class community relations" to prevent more riots.

David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham, urged politicians to "junk the language of the Tebbit test" – the marker set by Norman Tebbit about whether ethnic minorities living in Britain supported the English cricket team. But he insisted he was not criticising David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who was accused of echoing Lord Tebbit after he suggested that people from the ethnic minorities should accept the norms of British life, including the English language.

Mr Lammy, seen as a rising star by Downing Street and tipped as a future Cabinet minister, wrote most of his 16,000-word report on race before Mr Blunkett's remarks. But his stark analysis and criticism of the Home Office will fuel the heated debate following this week's inquiry reports on the race riots in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley this summer. He also calls for the abolition of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE). He argues that the race debate has barely moved on in the past 50 years, despite a succession of inquiries including the Scarman report into the 1981 riots and the Macpherson inquiry following the death of Stephen Lawrence.

Mr Lammy believes the Home Office will never succeed in promoting racial harmony while it is primarily a "law and order" department with a tough line on immigration and asylum-seekers. He questions whether it has "the vocabulary to articulate the positive vision of leadership" needed on race.

He says the Home Office's Immigration and Nationality Directorate and Race Equality Unit tend to be "in conflict rather than co-operation, with each pursuing its own agenda at the expense of the Government's credibility." He warns: "Evidence suggests a correlation between hard-line statements on asylum in the press and increases in racially motivated attacks."

The report, presented to a seminar held by the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank, calls for race to be transferred to a new Department of Citizenship, headed by a Cabinet minister. Mr Lammy believes that citizenship "celebrates what we have in common, not what makes us different." Although he says the Home Office could not be blamed for this summer's riots, he adds: "Given the longstanding nature of the triggers, it is worrying that Home Office race policy was seemingly so overtaken by events."

Warning of more riots, he says: "There is every danger of history repeating itself ... Young people in deprived communities are not being galvanised into social and political activism, but are instead channelling their energy into criminality, xenophobia and, amongst some ethnic groups in certain areas, religious fundamentalism." The result is a widening generational gap between community leaders and young people.